LiDAR configuration comparison for urban mapping system

The Mobile Mapping System (MMS) is widely used when mapping urban environment. The critical challenge for mapping accuracy is at localization accuracy under highly sporadic global positioning system (GPS) signal. To tackle this issue, approaches often rely on cameras and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)s to exploit visual and spatial features in the environment. Among many sensors, this paper focuses on the use of LiDAR, especially evaluating the LiDAR types and mechanical configurations. In this paper, we compare two typical LiDAR configurations, push-broom (2D) and 360 scanning (3D) style, in terms of the resulting mapping performance. Resulting maps from two configurations over the same place are directly compared to evaluate characteristic of each LiDAR configuration.